BLOG Intro - "NOW on NOW — Using Demand Management at ServiceNow"

[Lisa_Manchester]

Who we are:

My email signature line reads, "Director — Business Process Management". I'm not a "certified" Project or Program Manager. I'm a process designer currently working on internal processes at ServiceNow. I work very closely with our Internal Development Team. Together, we serve our internal customers…and also our end customers where they meet up with our internal processes.

What we do:

Like many of you, we have a large number and wide variety of groups who want to improve/augment their processes…Customer Support, Product Development, Program Management, Infrastructure teams, Account Management…just to name a few of our internal customers. We have been using the SDLC module to manage development work, but we have struggled to manage larger projects and to communicate timelines, progress, shifts, etc. We need a way to:

• Take in requests (demand)
• Prioritize the requests and get them on a timeline to be worked
• Manage the life cycles of the work — gather business requirements, design a solution, develop the solution, test the solution, release the solution.
• Report on the entire thing along the way — milestones, risks, delays, changes, etc. We need this to be visible to our stakeholders on demand, so that they don't have to wait for a "report" from us.

Where we have been:

Over the last year or so, we have tried several ways to manage projects. We had some success with a "steering committee" that consisted of the leaders of each of the internal Lines of Business (LOB). We met monthly or so and each LOB leader brought in new projects for the larger team to score. This gave us a prioritized list of projects. But, we still struggled to show a roadmap of when those projects would be worked and completed. We later switched to more focused meetings with individual LOB leaders, where they could present their projects and we could report on how we were doing with the existing projects. Some issues we had:

• Our scoring model did not really differentiate the projects enough, they were still too close together in score.
• We did not have a way for our internal customers, LOB leaders, to see the roadmap on demand. What if they just wanted to peek in on how things were going? They couldn't.
• When we showed the LOB leaders our timelines, it was very difficult to show where things had slipped the timeline, why they slipped and when they were now expected to complete.
• New, super-important-must-be-done-right-now projects continue to come in and disrupt the timeline. We don't expect this to stop happening, but we need a better way to manage these and provide visibility to everyone.
• We have trouble dealing with very small, "one-off" requests. They don't need all of the management of a "project" but they are still important. It is difficult to track them and keep them moving along with the larger items.

Our new plan — using ServiceNow Demand Management:

We are running on the cutting-edge of Eureka and we've recently starting using the Demand Management module to enter in demand coming from our stakeholders. We just started recently. Here is our plan:

• We have Process Managers (we call them Product Owners or PO) who work with the various business groups to determine the next projects needed. The PO enters each desired project as a separate demand record in Demand Management. We are using a super-simple approach, Category is always "Strategic" and Type is always "Project". We use a single value (1-10) for Business Value, a single value for size using "t-shirt" sizing (S, M, L, XL, XXL) and Risk is a single value (1-10). These numbers are used to populate the bubble chart under Demand Management. Currently, we are finding that things tend to group very tightly together on the chart and we will likely need a new way to differentiate. The PO also adds some kind of Business Requirements Document to the demand record, to give development an idea of what the project is about.
• Once the demand is submitted, the Development Managers plays the role of "Demand Manager". They review each demand item and attach a size and a risk. The size is based on "t-shirt" sizing. When the demand is entered, the PO attaches a short document laying out the business problem we are solving or the objective we are trying to achieve. The development team can use this to assign a basic t-shirt size, based on their experience with previous similar projects. It is quick-and-dirty but tends to work well.
• Before each quarter start, the development team goes through the scored and sized demand to work out a roadmap for the upcoming quarter.
• Development and the Product Owners work together to communicate the upcoming quarterly roadmap to the internal stakeholders.
• After that, our intention is to use the PPM tool to track each project and keep track of milestones. We haven't started that yet so I don't have a lot of details.

How we got this far:

We began the implementation of Demand Management in May, with a team from Internal Systems Development of scrum masters, development managers, and a program manager. With the help of our Product Development team, and direction from the Business Process group, we set up a simplified 1-10 business value scoring, based on an existing project evaluation process. This minimized the business process changes as we moved to Demand Management. After a month of mapping the business processes with the Product Owners, setting up the application, including portfolios for the Lines of business and testing the Demand Management application, we held training sessions with the Product Owners. They quickly learned the application, and by the end of June we had the next quarter's demand in the system. We have completed the first management review — using nothing but the ServiceNow Demand Management application. In the first week of July we will present the 3rd quarter plan to the LOB leaders, again using the Demand Planning application for the presentation. Is the process perfected? No, but we are learning quickly by doing.

I hope this gives you a flavor of what we are doing. My plan is to post relatively regularly about how it is going. Comments, questions and feedback welcome.